בבא קמא ג ע''א One פסוק deals with damages caused by שן.  Another פסוק deals with damages caused by רגל.
We have other  to tell us each verse means as we say it does. We need those extra verses because without them we would say there are two kinds of רגל or two kinds of שן. If he sent the animal there is more reason to make him pay. So we need some reason to say he is liable even if the animal walked by itself. Similarly if the animal ate in a field, there is more reason to make one liable if the roots were eaten. How do we know רביע שלישי ורביעי? Because of a היקש. We compare רגל with שן. In שן we make no distinction between when the owner sent it and when it walked by itself, so also with רגל. And visa versa for שן.

Then a ברייתא uses one פסוק for both רגל and שן, and as for רביע שלישי  we have another פסוק. So what about רביע רביעי? And here we can't use the way the תלמוד accounted for רביע רביעי על ידי היקש because here there is no separate verse for שן. There is one word for both. And to expand רגל into רביע שלישי we needed an extra verse. There is no היקש to tell us to expand into רביע רביעי. The last section of the מהרש''א answers this for the statement that רגל and שן are שקולים in the sense that if you exclude one you have to exclude the other, and if you include one you must include the other.  I am not sure how this helps us. We still know nothing about רביע רביעי.
 Let's go back. We have no היקש between שן ורגל because we are deriving both from the same verse. The only way we got to רביע שלישי was by a special verse. That leaves רביע רביעי empty. There is no היקש between שן ורגל.

On the other hand maybe this works. after all the same logic applies. We don't make any distinction between when the roots were eaten or not by foot. So also with tooth.


5.7.15
בבא קמא ג ע''א אחת פסוק אחד עוסק בנזקים שנגרמו על ידי שן. אחר פסוק אחר עוסק בנזקים שנגרמו על ידי רגל
.
יש לנו אחרים כדי לומר לנו כל פסוק עושה כפי שאנו אומרים שהוא עושה. אנחנו צריכים אותם פסוקים נוספים משום שבלעדיהם היינו אומרים שיש שני סוגים של רגל או שני סוגים של שן. אם הוא שלח את בעלי החיים יש יותר מסיבה לחייב לו לשלם. אז אנחנו צריכים סיבה לומר שהוא עלול אפילו אם בעל החיים הלך בכוחות עצמו. באופן דומה, אם  החיה אכלה בשדה, יש עוד סיבה לעשות אחד חייב אם השורשים נאכלו. איך אנחנו יודעים רביע שלישי ורביעי? בגלל היקש. אנו משווים רגל עם שן. בשן אנחנו לא עושים שום הבחנה בין כאשר הבעלים שלחו אותו וכאשר הוא הלך בעצמו, כך גם עם רגל. ולהיפך לשן.

אז ברייתא משתמשת עם פסוק אחד לשניהם, רגל ושן, וכמו לרביע השלישי יש לנו פסוק אחר. אז מה לגבי רביע רביעי? וכאן אנחנו לא יכולים להשתמש בדרך התלמוד  על ידי היקש, כי כאן אין פסוק נפרד לשן. יש מילה אחת לשניהם. ולהרחיב את הרגל לרביע שלישי שהיינו צריכים פסוק נוסף. אין היקש לספר לנו להתרחב לרביע רביעי. החלק האחרון של מהרש''א מתרץ שרגל ושן הם שקולים במובן זה שאם אתה מוציא אחד אתה צריך להוציא את השני, ואם אתה כולל אחד אתה חייב לכלול את אחר. אני לא בטוח איך זה עוזר לנו. אנחנו עדיין לא יודעים כלום על רביע רביעי
 בואו נחזור. אין לנו היקש בין שן והרגל, כי שן ורגל נובעים מאותו הפסוק. הדרך היחידה שהגענו לרביע שלישי הייתה בפסוק מיוחד. זה משאיר רביע רביעי ריק. אין היקש בין שן ורגל


מצד השני, אולי זה עובד.כל אותו ההיגיון חל. אנחנו לא עושים שום הבחנה בין כאשר השורשים נאכלו או לא ברגל. אז גם עם שן.




Here is a link to my little booklet on subjects like thisIdeas in Shas

 Rambam:  the five difference between the Reason of God and the Reason of Man. [Here "Reason of Man" means  the reason a man would have if he had perfect human reason.] This is not the exact same thing as Kant. With Kant you have limit to perfect reason. And it seems to be a bit different than the Rambam's limits. .




The problem that Kant is addressing is that of Hume. Empirical things we can reason about because we have some way of checking our homework against a background. Physical reality. When we reason about a triangle what background is there to check our work? 


And this seem to me to be a close as one can expect to Kant. For Kant while accepting we have knowledge of a priori things --not based on observation and also not dependent on definitions. But with Kant you have a large area of antimonies where even this kind of reason fails.

So what I am suggesting is a close comparison between the Rambam's five things and Kant's antimonies.


Appendix:
(1)  Aspects of God's knowledge beyond pure reason:
There is no division in his knowledge even when he knows different things. His knowledge does not take something out of the realm of the possible. His knowledge encompasses things that have no end There is no difference in his knowledge before the thing exists and after it comes into being.
Brisk has done very good work in the Rambam and that work is continuing.
The major players in that school are Chaim Soloveitchik, and his direct disciples Baruch Ber  Shimon Shkop. The great book of them all is the master piece of Rav Shach the Avi Ezri.  This I consider to be greater than even the חידושי הרמב''ם. Why? Because even though it was Reb Chaim that opened the door to the Rambam but Rav Shach went in in away that even Reb Chaim could not. Rav Shach  is deeper and clearer. But none of these deal with the Guide for the Perplexed. And I think there is no excuse for that. None whatsoever. If anything the Guide is as deep as the Mishna Torah. Once You have someone of the stature of Rav Abraham Abulfia witting a mystic commentary of the Guide you know something deep is going on there.

Music for the glory of God,

l98


Mathematics

If you have suffered from a certain person the tendency is to find blame in that person's world view. One tends to think that if the system was different evil would be eradicated.

People that have suffered from people that are theists tend to say theism is the problem. If one has suffered from people that believe in a different system, the tendency will be to blame that system. Another example is if people have suffered under the Nazis, then the tendency is to say the belief system of Nazism is the trouble. And this kind of thinking is sometimes justified. After all blaming Nazism for the Holocaust does not seem like much of a stretch. But there are other times that it seems to me that building ones world view on what he sees as negative influences is a dumb way of going about thinking about these things.

Human evil is the type of thing that even people believing in a good system will get the virus of evil. No system is immune. But that does not mean all systems are alike. Nor are all social memes alike. You find one social meme  you think is bad and try to eradicate it you will probably find two that have grown in its stead.

But like Nazism there are certain social memes which are pernicious.

Sometimes one has just found a bad group inside a decent system.
 Personally I go with my parents system, Judaism, but I modify that with a good dose of traditional learning Talmud and keeping Jewish Law. But the basic structure of belief--the world view of my parents of what makes a man into a "mensch" I think they knew more about that than anyone I have ever met.

But their beliefs were not really in accord with Reform  even though we went to a Reform Shul in Hollywood.--a great place--Temple Israel of Hollywood. But teh belif system of my parents was a lot more traditional that official Reform.

To get an idea of what my parents thought and what I think is the proper approach to life I recommend learning Musar. That is the  basic set of medieval books חובות לבבות אורחות צדיקים מסילת ישרים  etc. there are about thirty in all. This is hard reading. The ideas are not hard. It is rather that by reading these books and saying them out loud as you read you get fear of God. And that is hard work. It is not supposed to be light reading.

Music for the glory of God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and of my parents.

b105 

I am upset by the attacks against the USA. Mainly because the USA, the country that I grew up in, was  wholesome and wonderful, and so unrecognizable from what there is today I simply can't comment on it. It is like the first Temple that Solomon built. I am sad it is gone, but there is not much I can do about restoring it.
Mainly I think it was a communist plot. The idea was to undermine American values in universities, and then Americans themselves would destroy it from within. Most people I know don't think the KGB had that kind of influence. But first of all the KGB was highly compartmentalized. And the part of it devoted to disinformation in the USA would not have been known to other department people. Also, I should mention the budget of the KGB for these kind of operations was enormous. And once you have gotten to people in collage and convinced them of the "truths" of socialism, then even when they becomes senators or judges or even the president, they continue with those same policies.
Today the KGB is gone, and I doubt if Russia has the same goals as the USSR. They might want an expanded Russian empire, but I highly doubt if they are interested in the downfall of the USA.
Today the main threat against the USA are Muslims, but they are not the only ones. The Democrats are hard at work undermining the basis of the USA in other ways.

Music for the glory of God,

b98 mp3

b98  [midi] I think I  posted this before some time ago. I am just doing so again just in case. b98 nwc

Music,

q3  [q3 in midi]  q3 nwc

l87  [l87 in midi]  l87 nwc

I might at the end of this blog put down the basic idea but for now I wanted to say over what I think describes עבודת השם the service of God.  The only place I ever saw what could be described as the service of God was at the two Litvak yeshivas I went to in NY.  It was not just that people were learning Torah for its own sake without thought of compensation. It was a kind luminous numinosity.


לנחמן מאומן יש פרק בליקוטי מוהר''ן שנראה שמתייחס אליי בדרכים רבות. זה לווה מהמורה נבוכים של רמב''ם. והוא מדבר על היתרונות  בהבאת אנשים לעבודת השם.
אני יכול בסופו של הבלוג הזה לסכם את הרעיון הבסיסי אבל עכשיו אני רוצה להגיד על מה שאני חושב שמתאר עבודת השם. המקום היחיד שאי פעם ראיתי מה יכול להיות תואר אמיתי של עבודת  אלוהים היה בשתי ישיבות ליטאיות שהלכתי בניו יורק. זה לא היה רק שאנשים לומדים תורה לשמה ללא מחשבה על הפיצוי. זה היה סוג זוהר


It is my observation that learning Torah for its own sake only happens in Lithuanian type of yeshivas. And so I consider that path alone to be in the category of service of God.

 Kelly Ross who I think is the deepest of all philosopher and the widest.

And he also is not much of an authoritarian. 

I call him deepest because he seems to be always able to zero in on the flaws of philosophies that are considered rigorous and logically exact . For some reason he always finds the major flaw. And he is politically a libertarian or more exactly he goes with the American Constitution.

The other thinkers that are important are Karl Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies), Michael Huemer (The essay which destroyed Marxism.). I mind include Allen Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) (Closing of the American Mind) and Harold Bloom (The Lucifer Principle) (howard_bloom___the_lucifer_principle).

The thing about all these people are they are not authoritarians. But they are different in many ways.

The most encompassing and systematic is  Kelly Ross.

The question that comes up then is how to reconcile this with Torah. If Torah was solely a issue of personal morality then there would not be  any question. But it is public law also in the sense that the only authority anyone has in Torah is to enforce the laws of the Torah. The Torah gives some legitimacy to a Sanhedrin and to a king  and even to prophets but not one of these can change or modify or reinterpret a single law. They can only deal with the questions what is the law and how does it apply and also to solve contradictions based on the 13 principles.

The best interface between Torah and libertarian ideas I think is Kelly Ross. At least he was reading his material that helped me organize my own ideas into a cohesive system.

Music

j27 mp3 [j27 midi j27 nwc]   j15 mp3[j15 midi  j15 nwc]

Even though we find a lot of good points by the Religious Zionists, still if  you want to come to the service of God you have to have something along the lines of a Lithuanian Yeshiva. That is for a least four years you need to concentrate of Torah  in order to get anywhere in it. And that needs to be done with Musar. That is you need a straight Litvak Yeshiva or you need to do this on your own. And if you can't do it on your own you can at least help others to try to do this. The idea here is that a Litvak yeshiva is a kind of incubator for good Jews.

And you cant get the same kind of effect when you dilute the Torah. That is why traditional Litvak yeshivas learned only Torah.--though at Chaim Berlin people did go to Brooklyn collage in the afternoon. [Rav Hutner was going to introduce secular studies even beyond high school but Reb Aaron Kotler begged him not to do so.]

So you can either learn Torah at home or try to start your own Litvak yeshiva.
But how to start such a thing? If you are learning at home I have already written about how to go about learning Torah. Mainly you need to stay on one page for as long as it takes until you can start to see the depths of the Talmud. You keep at that same page day after day with the Maharsha and Maharam until it starts to open up. And you need  a fast session also.
That is for you alone. at most it is two hours per day. But as for making your own yeshiva you need someone that has fit to teach. That is need to impossible to find. One who knows "how to learn" is very rare. The main places you can find someone like this are in the basic set of Litvak yeshivas in Bnei Brak Jerusalem or NY. That is Ponovitch, Brisk, and in NY the Mirrer, Chaim Berlin, and Torah VeDaat. Anyone who has not learned in one of those place you can be guaranteed can't learn.
Don't be fooled by the frauds.

The issue is that the Rambam says that the land of Israel was divided among the tribes by Joshua so that when they would go and conquer it would not have the status of the conquest of an individual. [I think that is in Hilchot Trumah.]

You can see why this is important. Jerusalem was never conquered by any of the tribes until the time of King David. So we have now that the land of Reuben and Gad had the status of Israel along with all the rest of Israel. So far everything seems good. But what about Syria? Syria was conquered by the general of Kind David. But it did not gain the status of Israel because Jerusalem had not been conquered at that point. [or at least not all of the seven Canaanite nations had not be conquered.]

But if Joshua had already divided up the land so that no conquest of any area would be conquest of an individual then it should not matter if Jerusalem was in the hands of Israel at that point!!!


  The idea that there are times that the holiness of the land of Israel is not revealed. That is--even though the holiness is always there still it can't be revealed until Israel comes and conquers. That would apparently have to refer to כיבוש בבל when the exiles returned from Babylon. That is because the Talmud says openly that the first conquest did not sanctify the land except at that time alone.


This might help on on the point of joy also. There are lots of kinds of happiness that are evil. E.g happiness at the sorrow of another person. Good traits can becomes bad if misused. Certainly we don't consider compassion on the same level as cruelty. Yet compassion in the wrong time and place is cruel. That does not mean that compassion is bad. Not at all. Rather it can be misused. We find holy things can become profane. E.g. sacrifices that have not been eaten in the proper time period  etc.

It is mainly in Religious Zionist places that you find a combination of learning Torah and natural sciences. In the insane religious world  places you don't see this much. And when the the insane religious world  engage in secular activity it is never in the natural sciences. If they go into science at all, it is always pseudo science. And pseudo sciences are attractive, compelling, and false.
It is hard to balance natural sciences with learning Torah. The tendency is to lose the balance between the two. Or to denigrate one at the expense of the other.
But to ignore one or the other requires a enormous hubris.

Does the collective wisdom of the ages in the Old Testament and Talmud and books of Musar have nothing to tell us today? It requires a large degree of stupidity to think so. But on the other hand can you dismiss the natural sciences as false inventions of man? That seems to require even a greater degree of lunacy and stupidity than the first type.

These are not my considerations alone and they are not idea spun out of thin air.

The most compelling argument for what I am saying is a resort to authority, Moshe ben Maimon. The Rambam. He placed the natural sciences on  a plane higher than Talmud,  but required the Oral Law as proper preparation and foundation.

The easiest way to see this is in the son of the Rambam, Avraham. For the Rambam himself is a bit of a mystery. No one can seem to figure out the right kind of interface between the Mishne Torah {the legal book of the Rambam} and his Guide for the Perplexed [his philosophical work.]

The son of the Rambam provided that interface in his Musar book  מספיק לעובדי השם Enough for the servants of God. There you see in the same characteristic clarity of the Rambam the actual practical implication of what it means to live according to the ideas of the Rambam.

Music for the glory of God,

j12   j17   j16

But from the books of Musar we can that there are kinds of joy that are bad. As Steven Dutch writes ''Some will adhere to the established religion out of sincere conviction, but will disagree with important tenets. They will attempt to recast the religion in more personally palatable terms, or possibly work to redirect the religion itself into more agreeable lines. The changes may be real reforms, or merely redefinition into something more palatable.That is a recasting to redirect things is honest in itself as long as the basic principles of the religion are preserved.'' That is Steven Dutch's opinion and it makes sense to me.